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News, Pointers & Commentary Archive: November 1998
| 13 November 1998 | "I eat my peas with honey / I've done it all my life It makes the peas taste funny / But it keeps them on the knife" --From the children's book & record combo 'A rocket in my pocket', way back in nineteen mumble-mumble |
Do they still make book & record sets? With tapes, or 45s, or CDs? Or have they been completely supplanted by CD-ROMs and such? Just woolgathering...
A poster for the new Star Wars movie has been released. Click on the poster image to get a large version:
- Episode I - Production Updates [Starwars.com]
I think it's a clever, simple, immediately understandable image. Neato.
Episode I's trailer starts appearing in theatres next weekend, apparently.
You haven't been completely jerked around until you've been jerked around by Microsoft's pay-per-incident technical support.
Advice for any sysadmins out there: Microsoft Exchange Server is not something you should use if you have more than a couple hundred users. The disaster recovery techniques are time-consuming, unreliable, and generally atrocious.
Dealing with an e-mail-related accident from last week has cost me days, and it will cost me my weekend as well. (Frankly, I'll be lucky if that's all the more time it will cost me). Heck, if this hadn't happened, I might have had my new site set up by now...
Too many Microsoft packages are like Gateway computers - when they are working, they basically do the job. If anything goes wrong, though, get ready for a very long, hard road.
| 10 November 1998 | "Can't sleep. Clown'll eat me." --Bart Simpson |
Witness the a cappella madness this Friday & Saturday in Graham Chapel - it's Green Eggs & Jam, hosted by the WU Greenleafs, with special guests the Tufts Beelzebubs and the Dartmouth Aires. The Pikers and Mosaic Whispers will also be performing.
I had this huge bunch of stuff to post but ran out of time. Maybe tomorrow.
| 5 November 1998 | "Sometimes, I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door, and just visit now and then." -- Katharine Hepburn |
Gobble, Gobble: Microsoft buys LinkExchange:
I was just thinking the other day, "Control over a worldwide system of banner ad placement is exactly something I think Microsoft should have. Why, it fits with their business model so well! It makes so much sense!"
All right, so that's not exactly what I was thinking...
In the last several days I've been reacquainting myself with Larry Marder's Beanworld. No way to describe what it is in a few words; visit an unofficial Beanworld page to get an inkling of what it's like. Hoka-hoka-hey!
Wonderful, mythic, symbolic, primal stuff. Highly recommended.
| 3 November 1998 | "Indeed, TV newscasters have added to our grammar a new part of speech altogether, what may be called the 'now this' conjunction. 'Now this' is a conjunction that does not connect two things but does the opposite. It disconnects." -- Television and the Decline of Public Discourse, Neil Postman. |
I buy stuff on the Net all the time now -- CDs, books, comics, airplane tickets and even computer equipment. Doesn't bother me a bit, though I do prefer to have a secure connection to the vendor. Most folks still seem a bit jumpy about it, and Net companies and philosophers would like to change that:
- Debunking the e-commerce theft myth by Tim Clark [News.com]
Call it the biggest Internet commerce myth ever, this widely held but nonetheless false belief that credit card numbers are swiped as they cross the Internet, then used fraudulently. // Or call my bluff. I'm issuing a challenge to readers, the same one often put to me by e-commerce companies: Name one person that has happened to. ... until someone can cite a case, it's hard to take the threat seriously.[Safe practices:] First, don't send credit card information by e-mail -- it's not as secure as a secure connection between your Web browser and the storefront.
Second, make sure you have a secure connection to a merchant site. Check the lower left-hand corner of your Web browser to make sure you got the little symbol of an unbroken lock or key. See if the URL begins with "https://", a sign of a secure connection. Both indicate a secure connection using Secure Sockets Layer or SSL.